Friday, August 23, 2019

I’ll say this much for Pania Newton, the leader of the
Ihumatao occupation: she’s got nerve.

I don’t mean that in a complimentary way. Perhaps chutzpah,
that wonderful Hebrew word meaning brazen audacity or cheek, would be a more
appropriate term.

Newton effectively demanded that prime minister Jacinda
Ardern drop everything and rush to Mangere to pay homage to her. When Ardern
politely declined, an obviously sniffy Newton arranged a protest march on
Ardern’s electorate office, just to let her know her priorities were all wrong.

Well, here’s the news: the prime minister of New Zealand is
not answerable to Newton or her followers.

Clearly, all the media adulation of the past few weeks had
gone to Princess Pania’s imperious head. How dare the prime minister ignore her?

But on this occasion, Ardern was right – right not to go to
Ihumatao, and right not to be at her Mt Albert office to meet the protest marchers.
She had other commitments to fulfil and was entitled to put them first.

The same was true when she went to Tokelau last month and
was unfairly chided by Simon Bridges for being a part-time prime minister. What
was Bridges suggesting: that she cancel a long-scheduled visit to a New Zealand
dependency – the first by a prime minister in 15 years – just to humour some
protesters? That struck me as a very peculiar call for a National Party leader
to make, and one that raised questions – not for the first time – about Bridges’
judgment.

As for Newton, she needed to be put in her place. It would
have done her no harm to have her massive sense of entitlement punctured.

Besides, Ardern had already made one mistake by arbitrarily
announcing a halt to the Ihumatao development when she had no right to. Either
she’s had second thoughts or her advisers have convinced her that the
government should stay well clear of what is essentially an intra-tribal
dispute.

Her public position now is that there’s a reconciliation process
underway involving the Tainui iwi and it should be allowed to take its course:
Maori negotiating with Maori.

Much as it would suit Newton for the government to intervene
on her side, it would be utterly wrong – and a dangerous precedent – for the
state to interfere with a deal lawfully done between the developers, Fletchers,
and tribal elders. To use a rugby analogy, it would be screwing the scrum.

It spoke volumes that when Ihumatao protest supporters marched
on Parliament last month demanding government intervention, Maori MPs
acquainted with the history of the dispute stayed away, quietly insisting that
it was a matter for the mana whenua – the people with ancestral rights over the
land – to sort out themselves.

Sadly but predictably, Green MPs have not been so circumspect.
Ihumatao in many respects is the perfect Green Party cause – one where overwrought,
undergraduate idealism and overheated rhetoric prevails over considered assessment.
So it was no surprise that Marama Davidson, Golriz Ghahraman, Jan Logie and
Chloe Swarbrick made sure they were seen virtuously displaying their solidarity
with the supposed victims of colonial oppression.

Now I see normally sensible commentators tut-tutting over
Ardern’s hands-off approach. Peter Dunne has written an emotional piece for Newsroom in which he presents Ihumatao as
the newest addition to a growing list of issues on which the Labour Party has betrayed
its supporters’ expectations and crushed their hopes.

Simon Wilson in the New
Zealand Herald goes much further, suggesting that this is a defining test
of Ardern’s leadership. In an apparent rush of blood to the head he labels
Ihumatao as “a disaster” and a “cultural crisis”.

No it’s not, Simon. Get a grip.

He even draws a parallel with the Christchurch mosque
massacres, implying that Ardern has the same moral responsibility to front-foot
the issue as when 51 people were murdered by a terrorist. But a child can see
there’s no equivalence. No one has died at Ihumatao, no one’s life is even
threatened, and in fact there’s no reason to suppose that the dispute won’t
eventually be satisfactorily resolved.

But that requires people to calm down, take a deep breath
and stop indulging in breathless hyperbole (in Wilson’s case) and emotional blackmail
(in Newton’s). Then we might get somewhere.

I recently did something every rah-rah cheerleader for
Wellington should do.

I took the Airport Flyer bus from the airport to the railway
station. It’s a trip that presents a very different picture of the city from the
one promoted by the booster brigade for the world’s “coolest capital”.

The problem is not the bus service, as suggested recently by
a local politician, doubtless with his eyes on the forthcoming council
elections. It’s the city itself.

For many visitors, the Airport Flyer provides the first experience
of Wellington, and it’s not an inspiring one. It may be heresy to say this, but
Wellington as seen from the airport bus is grotty.

Note that I say grotty, not
gritty; gritty can be cool, but grotty never is.

The capital has a magnificent front entrance, but the
Airport Flyer approaches the city via its scruffy back yard.

Before going any further, I should stress that I’ve spent
much of my working life in and around Wellington, and there’s a lot about the
city that I love. I’ve proudly shown overseas visitors its better parts.

There remains some truth in the slogan that you can’t beat
Wellington on a good day, but the rarely mentioned qualification to that
statement is that the truly good days come rarely.

The reason Wellington
celebrates them so extravagantly is that its climate is essentially hostile to
human existence.

Much of the time the city is bleak and windblown, as it was
on the day of my Airport Flyer ride. This served only to accentuate the
inconvenient truth that large parts of Wellington look drab, desolate and
neglected.

Our trip begins in Rongotai. There’s been a lot of talk in
recent years about how the presence of Sir Peter Jackson’s film-making empire
has lifted the eastern suburbs, but there’s bugger-all evidence of it in
Rongotai and Kilbirnie.

Mostly the flat eastern suburbs remain what they always
were: areas of mean, low-cost, early 20th century houses jammed too
close together and apparently owned by landlords too stingy to do maintenance
or buy paint. Many have been butchered by cheap and ill-conceived alterations.

The tone lifts as the bus proceeds through Hataitai, one of
my favourite Wellington suburbs, and the quaint Mt Vic bus tunnel is a
treasure. But then you’re through to the other side, and it’s almost Kilbirnie
all over again.

Mt Victoria is supposedly one of Wellington’s most desirable
locations, but you wouldn’t guess it from Pirie St. It’s a clutter of
ill-matching properties, many of them tired, rundown and of little aesthetic or
architectural merit. San Francisco it ain’t.

Cambridge and Kent terraces are an eyesore – a jumble of
cheap, gimcrack commercial buildings cobbled together by opportunist investors and
developers with no concern other than making a buck.

Courtenay Place? It looks even more squalid by day than by
night, when at least the darkness blurs the tattiness. Manners Street is little
better.

It was about this point on my journey that I noticed
something else. The few people on the streets appeared to have purchased their
clothing from op-shops and generally looked demoralised and defeated.

A stranger would have concluded that this was the poor side
of a town that had seen better days – an antipodean Detroit, perhaps – and that
the sad-looking pedestrians shuffling along the footpaths were making their way
to the nearest soup kitchen.

The overall impression created by both the people and the
shabby streetscapes was one of impoverishment. But this was downtown Wellington
– "Absolutely Positively Wellington", the dynamic capital of one of the world’s
most affluent economies. How could this
be?

Earlier that morning I had flown in from Europe where, for
all its supposed problems and stresses, city streets were teeming with life and
exuded energy and positivity, and where dazzling architecture turned my head
around every corner. The contrast was striking – and slightly unsettling.

I know other people who have noted the same thing about
Wellington but are afraid to state it for fear of being howled down.

It’s only when the Airport Flyer gets to Willis Street and
Lambton Quay that the traveller gets any impression of a vibrant and prosperous
city. That’s assuming they haven’t already been so disconcerted by what they’ve
seen that they’ve pressed the “stop” buzzer and taken a cab back to the airport
so they can catch the next plane out again.

Admittedly there’s not a lot that can be done to fix this,
short of re-routing the Airport Flyer around the bays, which would obviously be
impractical. But let’s at least abandon the smug pretence that Wellington is a
glorious gem that instantly bewitches every newcomer.

Yes, bits of it are charming, but much of the city looks tired and unloved to the point of appearing almost derelict. If you don't believe me, take a trip on the Airport Flyer and try to look around with an objective eye.

Thursday, August 22, 2019

(A slightly shorter version of this column was published in the Manawatu Standard and other Stuff.co.nz papers on August 21.)

These are extraordinary times
in British politics. Under its flamboyant new prime minister, Boris Johnson,
Britain is more polarised than at any time since Margaret Thatcher.

A crucial difference is that
Thatcher split the country along traditional party lines. She was despised with
visceral intensity by the Left but revered by her own Conservative Party, whose
fortunes she revived after a spell in the doldrums under the colourless Edward Heath.

Electoral success is
ultimately what counts to the British Conservatives, as is the case with our
own National Party, and the Tories can normally be relied on to unite behind a
winner.

In Thatcher's case, the resistance within her own party came from a relatively small group of disaffected “wets” – most
notably her former minister Michael Heseltine – who disliked her swingeing
free-market economic reforms.

Johnson, on the other hand,
has fractured the Conservatives to the extent that some former Tory ministers
are exploring ways of helping Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to form an
“alternative” government.

In normal circumstances this
would be unthinkable, but these are not normal times.

The issue that has created
this deep political rupture is, of course, Britain’s membership of the
European Union. Johnson has staked his future on successfully leading Britain
out of the EU in line with the 2016 referendum that resulted in a 52-48 vote in
favour of leaving.

It’s a giant step into the
unknown – too risky by far for the so-called Remainers in the Conservative
Party, who are determined to thwart Johnson even if means installing Corbyn, an
unreconstructed, old-school socialist, in No 10 Downing St.

So what are we to make of the
politician whose tousle-haired blond head has become the lightning rod at the
centre of this storm?

Johnson’s defenders say he
has been unfairly and inaccurately caricatured, and they appear to have a
point.

He has been portrayed as a
British Donald Trump, with all that implies. He is commonly depicted as a
buffoon, an oaf and a dilettante. But he graduated from Oxford with a
second-class honours degree and had a successful career in journalism,
including six years as editor of The
Spectator, before moving into politics.

His best work as a journalist
was incisive and informed. It showed a level of intellectual sophistication and wit that
would be far beyond Trump.

Johnson has also been
described as the archetypal old Etonian toff – a cross between Bertie Wooster
and the classic boarding-school bounder so beloved of English fiction writers
dating back to Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

It’s certainly true that he
had a privileged and uniquely English upper middle-class upbringing, but he
combines that background with a sharp intellect and a common touch that was
evident in his eight years as Mayor of London. That’s a rare political skill set.

More unfairly, Johnson has
been disparaged as being anti-immigration and opposed to cultural diversity.
This ignores the inconvenient fact that he appointed a cabinet which includes
more ministers from ethnic minorities than any in British history.

Other criticisms – for
example, that he’s a serial philanderer and politically accident-prone – are
much harder to counter.

Inevitably, his political
ascendancy brought his turbulent personal life back into sharp focus. That was
apparent in June when The Guardian,
standard-bearer for the British Left,reported
that the police were called after neighbours overheard an angry shouting match
between Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds.

Not content with dialling 999,
the couple next door to Symonds’ flat in Camberwell thoughtfully recorded the
row and supplied the tape to the paper, which splashed it across the front
page.

The neighbours told The Guardian they recorded the
“screaming, shouting and banging” because they were concerned for Symonds’
safety.

Of course they were. No doubt
that’s why they took the tape to the paper.

Disappointingly for both the
neighbours and The Guardian, the
police, who sent three vehicles to Symonds’ address, said there were no
offences or concerns apparent and no cause for police action.

Johnson and Symonds
subsequently had to leave the flat because of protesters in the street outside.
No doubt they were concerned for Symonds’ safety too.

The neighbours, incidentally,
were subsequently identified as Eve Leigh and Tom Penn, who sound like a pair
of classic chardonnay socialists: she an American “experimental playwright”, he
a “theatre maker” – whatever that is – and composer. The arts sector is overwhelmingly, you might
say hysterically, anti-Johnson and anti-Brexit.

The flat occupied by Leigh
and Penn is reportedly valued at £750,000 so they’re obviously not short of a
bob. Both work in the arts sector, which is heavily dependent on state subsidies,
so they can be assumed to have their hands deep in the taxpayers’ pocket. Not
your working-class battlers, then.

Penn said he called The Guardian because he felt it was a
matter of important public interest. Yeah, right.

He claimed he was not political
but admitted he was a Remainer, while Leigh had proudly tweeted on a previous
occasion that she had given Johnson the finger. So we’re obviously talking
about people with a high level of emotional maturity as well as impeccable
moral principle.

Sanctimonious justifications
aside, the Guardian’s story looked
like a bit of journalistic mischief from a paper that vehemently opposes
Brexit. But it was an example of the type of scrutiny Johnson is subjected to.

Interestingly, the clash of
opinions over him has been fiercest among those who know him personally. It has
been played out in recent months in the columns of the magazine he once edited,
The Spectator.

It started with a savage
attack on him by Sir Max Hastings, a former editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph, who was once Johnson’s
boss.

Hastings, who once vowed to
flee to Buenos Aires if Johnson was given the keys to No 10, marvelled
that the Conservatives could consider delivering power into the hands of a man no
one could trust with their wallet, handbag or spouse.

He wrote that Johnson’s
air of geniality concealed an egomania that precluded concern for the interests
of any human being other than himself. In an even more damning article in The Guardian, Hastings accused him of
cowardice, moral bankruptcy and contempt for the truth.

Those attacks triggered a
withering response from Sir Conrad Black, the former owner of both The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, who has lately made a
comeback in public life after a period in disgrace for alleged embezzlement.

Black, who knows both men
well, declared Johnson to be more trustworthy and reliable than Hastings, whom
he labelled an ill-tempered snob.

It was an extraordinarily
bitter exchange between two prominent establishment figures, and an indication
of the depth of feeling over the new prime minister – and Brexit.

Clearly, Britain is in for a
wild ride. The world will be watching to
see whether Johnson crashes and burns, taking his country down with him, or
successfully delivers on his promise to restore British autonomy.

I know which outcome I'd prefer, but I wouldn't put money on it even if I had any.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

There are aspects of the Second World War that receive scant
attention in the West. We know about Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor and D-Day, but far
less about the Battle of Stalingrad or the Sino-Japanese War, simply because
Western countries weren’t directly involved. Yet the Battle of Stalingrad was
the bloodiest conflict in history, while the Japanese occupation of China
resulted in the deaths of between 10 and 25 million Chinese.

It’s very easy to forget, too, that the main victims of the war
were civilians. Civilian deaths totalled an estimated 50-55 million – more than
twice the number of military dead. China and the Soviet Union accounted for
roughly half of that total.

That civilians paid by far the highest price – either directly,
due to military activity and deliberate extermination, or through war-related famine
and disease – was brought home to me on my recent visit to Poland. Between 5
and 6 million Poles died during the war, of whom an estimated 3 million were
Jewish. That’s roughly 20 per cent of Poland’s population – a higher ratio of civilian
dead than even the Soviet Union, and more than twice that of Germany.

Walk around Warsaw and you can’t fail to be aware of the enormous
price Poland paid for events over which it had no control. In an article I
wrote for this week’s issue of The
Listener, marking the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, I
mention that there are at least 160 memorial plaques dotted around the Polish
capital, each signifying a place where civilians were the victims of Nazi
atrocities.

I now realise that my wife’s parents, who were forcibly
removed from Warsaw in the reprisals that followed the Uprising and were transported
to Germany to work in a labour camp, were among the lucky ones. As my Listener story points out, 10,000 civilians
were killed in the Ochota district where my parents-in-law lived. In another
part of the city, the Wola district, 40,000 died in acts of unimaginable
savagery.

As a point of comparison, New Zealand lost 12,000 people in the
same war, nearly all of them combatants. That equated to 0.72 percent of the
population. Yet proportionately, our military losses were the highest of any
Commonwealth country and caused immense grief. On Anzac Day, we quite rightly mourn
and honour the New Zealanders who died far away in a terrible conflict for
which they were blameless. But I wonder whether our commemorations should also
include acknowledgment of the many millions of civilians – Polish, Russian,
Chinese and, yes, German and Japanese too – who bore by far the harshest cost
of the conflict.

Friday, August 16, 2019

This blog achieved a milestone of sorts yesterday when it
clocked up its one millionth page view.

It’s taken a while to get there: the blog was launched in
May 2008.

For a long time my readership averaged between 200-300 page
views daily, but lately it’s been up around the 500 mark.

On a good day it can get as high as 2000. This usually happens
when there’s a link to this blog from a much more popular site such as Kiwiblog
or, until its recent demise, Whale Oil.

Who are my readers? I’m not really sure. Most commenters
choose to remain anonymous, which is fine with me unless they’re engaging in a
personal attack, in which case I want to know who my accusers are.

Speaking of which, I’m very grateful to the people who
comment regularly – you know who you are – and take some pride in the fact that
the comments, while often trenchant, are always intelligently expressed and don’t descend to the levels of abuse and
malice often seen elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Yesterday’s Dominion
Post included a letter from Victoria University academic Dolores Janiewski,
in which she took a poke at me for my recent column about the transgender mountain
biker Kate Weatherly (see “When gender politics morphs into craziness”, August
9).

Janiewski, a historian who includes gender, race, class and
culture among her research interests – make of that what you will – has criticised
me before, as she’s entitled to do. But on this occasion she seemed offended
because I didn’t write about things she thinks I should be writing about.

She questioned my use of the phrase “peak lunacy” in a
column about gender issues and noted that I failed to mention the killing of
Walmart shoppers in El Paso. (She may also have noted that I failed to mention Hiroshima, the Manson Family, thalidomide, rising sea levels and Catholic sex abuse. Just trying to be helpful here.)Janiewski went on to imply that because I didn’t write about the
El Paso shootings, I must think transgender mountain bikers are every bit as
mad and dangerous as white nationalists with guns. I believe this is called a
non sequitur – or if you want to be fancy, a deductive fallacy.

Yes, lots of things – hundredsof things, maybe even thousands – happen in the world on any given
day that are far crazier than a transgender mountain biker who insists on being
regarded as a woman. But on the day I wrote that column I happened to be
interested in Weatherly. In any case, thousands upon thousands of words were written all
around the world about the El Paso shooting and America’s gun laws (which is
what I suspect Janiewski was getting at), and anything I said would have merely
duplicated the futile pontificating of innumerable other commentators.

It’s not the first time I’ve been criticised for not writing
about what other people think is important. This assumes there’s some sort of consensus
about the things that really matter and anything not on the approved list should
be dismissed (or perhaps even censored) as being inconsequential, or a
distraction from pressing issues, or deviating from ideological orthodoxy. Underlying
this, it’s not hard to sense a moralistic urge to control the public conversation.

As for that phrase “peak craziness”, of course it was hyperbole
– a journalistic device used for effect. It shouldn’t need to be explained to
someone with a PhD from Duke University (Janiewski’s alma mater) that I wasn’t literally
suggesting Western civilisation had scaled the ultimate pinnacle of insanity. That
moment has yet to come and I hope I won’t be around when it does.

Janiewski also thought she’d skewered me because I
approvingly cited a University of Otago study about transgender athletes. How
did this square, she wondered (I’m paraphrasing her letter here), with my
previously expressed theory that all universities are complicit in a
neo-Marxist plot?

In fact there’s no inconsistency at all. It’s well within
the bounds of probability that any university which employs neo-Marxist
crackpots will also have academics on its staff, particularly in the sciences (and I don't mean the social sciences, which are not sciences at all), who
are uncontaminated by ideology and prefer objective, verifiable evidence. There
may be even a few of the latter at Victoria.

Finally, in what Janiewski probably thought was another “gotcha”
moment, she said I hadn’t noticed that prominent lesbian and radical feminists,
including Germaine Greer, had criticised transgender politics. “Perhaps
noticing such disagreements would cause du Fresne too much distress at having
to abandon his claims about a unified “Left” conspiracy bent on destroying
gender, biology and rationality itself,” she wrote.

Actually, no. The original draft of my column included the
following:

I’m not suggesting
that Weatherly is consciously part of a neo-Marxist plot to take over the
world.But I do suggest that she’s in
denial when she insists she’s a woman – and what’s more, despite her
protestations, that she does have an unfair advantage over her female
competitors.

I am supported in the
former assertion by many feminists, including the redoubtable Germaine Greer
and her fellow terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), and in the latter
by old-fashioned and rather inconvenient science.

I took that latter paragraph out because I was over my word
limit. So, no distress at all. On this issue, if not on many others, I’m on the
same side as Greer and the terfs.

What’s more, I don’t claim there’s a “unified” leftist conspiracy,
since one thing we can always rely on the left to do is tear itself apart in ideological
squabbles (which is pretty much what seems to be happening right now on the
gender battleground) while the rest of the world gets on with things that
matter.

I happened to hear a BBC interview with the Swedish teenage enviro-wunderkind
and media darling Greta Thunberg about her forthcoming trip to the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. (In case you haven’t heard, she’ll be
crossing the Atlantic on a racing yacht so as to avoid leaving a carbon
footprint.)

After discussing the privations of sailing on a yacht that
doesn’t have a toilet (oh, the sacrifices this selfless girl is willing to make
for the cause), the fawning interviewer asked what action Thunberg would be
seeking at the UN.

The answer was revealing. “Our job is to demand the solutions, not provide the solutions,” Thunberg
replied.

There you have it, really: the voice of privileged Western millennial
entitlement. Don’t bore me with the practical realities that politicians have
to grapple with. Don’t waste my time talking about the likely economic consequences
of abandoning fossil fuels for unreliable renewable energy sources, or the
downstream social impacts. Not my problem. Just fix it.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Stuff reports
today that Patrick Barrett, a senior lecturer in public policy and political
science at Waikato University, is concerned that not enough young people vote
in local government elections.

Fine. I agree that if only 33 per cent of eligible voters in
Hamilton cast votes, as happened in 2016, a lot of people are missing out on an
important opportunity to exercise their democratic right. Perhaps more to the
point, low voter turnout can skew the result and lead to the election of a
council that’s not truly representative of the community.

So what’s Barrett’s solution? He’s urging that the voting
age be lowered from 18 to 16.

Brilliant. I wonder what makes him think 16-18 year-olds are
any more likely to vote than all the millennials who don’t bother. I mean,
really.

Friday, August 9, 2019

History might well record that we reached peak craziness on
July 20, 2019.

That was when I read a story in the sports pages about a
champion New Zealand mountain biker named Kate Weatherly, who was born male but
“transitioned to female” from the age of 17.

Weatherly was reported as objecting to a University of Otago
study which found, surely to no one’s surprise, that transgender female
athletes have an advantage over rivals who are born female.

Her own record seems to prove the point. According to the
story, Weatherly went from being an “average” men’s downhill mountain biker to
winning the women’s elite national championship. Some rivals – again, surely to
no one’s surprise – say that’s unfair.

Weatherly resents being described as transgender and
disputes the finding that she enjoys an advantage over her rivals. “I’m not a
transgender,” she insists. “I am a woman who happens to be transgender. As a
result I want to be able to compete with my fellow women.”

It was at this point that that I wondered whether we had
reached peak lunacy. What civilisation has regarded for millennia as immutable
truths are now up for redefinition in the light of personal preference. Down is
up, wet is dry, night is day.

Weatherly’s perception of herself as “a woman who happens to
be transgender” is a piece of semantic trickery. It plays into the fashionable ideological
notion that virtually nothing is fixed and even words such as “male” and
“female”, which until recently were considered to have a settled and
universally understood meaning, are in fact infinitely flexible.

This in turn fits neatly with the neo-Marxist idea that sex
and sexual identity are mere social constructs, imposed on people by a
repressive, white, male-dominated, capitalist society, and must be overturned
if people are to be truly liberated.

The underlying aim is to destroy social cohesion by
magnifying minority grievances, and ultimately to subvert democracy by giving
supposedly oppressed groups special rights over others.

I’m not suggesting that Weatherly is consciously part of a
neo-Marxist plot. However I do suggest that she’s in denial when she insists
she’s a woman - and that despite her protestations, she does have an unfair
advantage over other competitors.

Weatherly may well have grown up wanting to be a girl. She
may feel like a woman and think of herself as one. That’s entirely her right,
and no one should stand in her way. She should be free to live as a female, as
“trans” people have quietly done for decades.

But claiming to be a woman doesn’t make her one. It doesn’t
eradicate that awkward XY chromosome conferred on her at birth. And it doesn’t oblige
the rest of us to think of her as female.

More to the point, she can’t get away with the claim that
she’s competing on a level playing field with mountain bikers who were born
female.

You can see why this is a nightmarish issue for sports
organisations, some of which have been intimidated into complying with the
aggressive demands of transgender athletes. But the science is clear.

It was all coolly set out by one of the authors of the Otago
University study, physiology professor Alison Heather, in an in-depth interview
for the Stuff website.

Weatherly, who has been having hormone treatment since she
was 17, says her testosterone is tested every three months and has never been
above 1.4 nanomoles per litre, which is within the average range for “cis”
women – those who are born female. The implication is that she enjoys no
advantage from having been born male.

But as Heather points out, many of the physical advantages
men have over women in sport – such as bigger and different-shaped bones,
greater muscle mass, larger hearts and superior oxygen capacity – are formed in
the womb and continue to develop through puberty.

In other words, they are fixed in place by the time a person
is in their teenage years and can’t be undone by hormone treatment. This might
explain Weatherly’s striking progression from an also-ran as a male mountain
biker to podium-finisher as a female.

Of course you’re immediately branded as transphobic if you
suggest that someone who transitions from male to female or vice versa can
never be quite the same as someone who is “cis” gender. But transphobia implies
fear and hatred, which is not what this is about.

Most New Zealanders, being a generally tolerant lot, probably accept that people should be free to assume whatever sexual identity suits them. It's only when they use their sexual identity or adopted gender to claim special treatment - or, in the case of sport, take unfair advantage over others - that it becomes an issue.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

It’s day three of the Great New Zealand Abortion Debate,
Part II (resuming after a 42-year interval), and it’s becoming increasingly plain that Morning Report – or at least Susie
Ferguson – has little intention of covering the issue even-handedly.

She gave us a clue to her feelings a couple of mornings ago
when she made a flippant remark about women having to pretend they were mad in order
to get an abortion under existing law. No prizes for guessing what she thinks,
then.

This morning Ferguson took up a claim by National MP Chris
Penk that Andrew Little’s abortion bill will allow abortions up to full term, which the public would almost certainly regard as intolerable.
But did we hear from Penk himself? Nope, not a word.

Ferguson would have been justified in grilling Penk about
the basis for his statement, but Morning
Report didn’t bother with that, perhaps because it would have given him a platform. Instead, Ferguson interviewed Helen
Paterson, the chair of Abortion Providers of Aotearoa New Zealand – an impeccably impartial authority. I mean, who better to provide an unbiased assessment of the proposed
law change than the people who provide abortions, whose business will be made much easier (and hence more profitable) if the bill proceeds?

First Ferguson invited Paterson to agree that Penk was
guilty of misinformation. Then she gently guided her through a series of soft
questions which brought forth an assurance that the proposed new law was “unlikely”
to change things “significantly” for women whose pregnancies had gone beyond 20
weeks.

She didn’t bother to pin Paterson down on whether the bill
might create a theoretical possibility that some babies would be aborted much
later than under the present law, which was surely the crux of Penk’s concern. Instead
Ferguson allowed Paterson to take refuge in a semantic discussion about the
meaning of the phrase “late-term abortion”.

But it got worse. Ferguson then suggested the language being
used in the abortion debate (she obviously meant by the anti-abortion lobby)
resembled the rhetoric heard in the United States – thus drawing a parallel
with a country where people opposed to abortion are portrayed as fanatics, religious
fundamentalists and oppressors of women. Not surprisingly, Paterson agreed that the language tended to
be “emotive”.

Fearlessly, Ferguson continued with her relentless
inquisition. “So the language being used is – what, unhelpful?” And astonishingly,
Paterson agreed that it was. Offensive too, she added.

Perhaps she was referring to the insistence by pro-lifers on using the word “babies” rather than the dehumanising “foetuses” favoured by the pro-choice movement.

Then the coup-de-grace. Was this emotive language a way of
distracting people from the “bare bones” of the law change? (Translation: is
the anti-abortion lobby trying to derail the bill by wittering on
about the right to life?) “Absolutely”, Paterson said.

Talk about having your feet held to the fire. Somehow I can’t
imagine Ferguson giving anyone from the anti-abortion lobby such a cruisy run.
That is, in the unlikely event that they’d be invited on to Morning Report in the first place.

Disclosure: I am opposed to abortion on demand. However you don’t need to be pro-life to believe that a publicly
owned broadcaster has an obligation to cover the abortion issue in a neutral
and balanced way.

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, August 7.)

One night last week on NewsHub
Live at 6pm, or whatever TV3’s news bulletin calls itself at the moment, I
watched journalist Adam Hollingworth reporting “live” from outside Mt Eden
Prison with the breathtaking news that an inmate had been diagnosed with
measles.

I felt sorry for Hollingworth. It was dark and probably cold
and he fumbled his lines.

For reasons that I don’t quite understand, any story containing
the word “measles” seems to get editors’ pulses racing. But more to the point,
it was impossible to see what purpose was served by Hollingworth reporting live
from a locale where nothing was happening: no flashing ambulance lights, no
stricken felon strapped to a stretcher, just a sign in the gloom identifying Mt
Eden.

He could just as easily have delivered his report from a warm, familiar newsroom where, if he fluffed his lines, he could start again – an option not
open to him when he was speaking live to camera. But the assumption in both
main TV networks’ newsrooms seems to be that “live” reports convey a dramatic sense of
immediacy, even when there’s nothing to see.

Later in the same bulletin another NewsHub reporter, Cleo
Fraser, reported from the scene of an incident in the Hutt Valley in which the
rogue driver of a road roller had terrorised a gathering of boy racers.

Again, why? The event she was describing – let’s call it
road roller rage – had taken place nearly two days before. (And no, the story
wasn’t about the roller driver being hailed as a national hero, although it would have been no surprise if he was.)

Fraser was reporting from a darkened stretch of road that
could have been anywhere. She could just as easily have been standing in a
service lane behind the NewsHub studio. No one would have been any the wiser
and her employers would have saved some petrol money.

Now before I go any further, I should disclose something.
When it comes to the television news, I’m a fundamentalist. I like my news
delivered without unnecessary embellishment.

For a start, I regard the dual newsreader setup favoured by
both main TV networks as pointless gimmickry, and for that reason I often opt
for the no-frills Prime News read by
Eric Young at 5.30pm.

Imagine that – a solo newsreader! But it’s how all our TV
news used to be delivered, and it’s still the method of presentation used by
most respected broadcasting organisations overseas.

Our TV bosses, however, apparently don’t think we can be
trusted to tune into the nightly news bulletin, still less persevere through a
full hour of it, without endless frippery to hold our attention.

And so we get ever-more-intrusive window-dressing. It’s no
longer enough, for example, for the bulletin to open with a boring shot of a
newsreader sitting at a desk. Instead, he or she now often stands,
ever-so-carefully posed, against a wall-sized backdrop representing whatever
story has been chosen – usually on the basis of its perceived emotional impact
rather than importance – to lead the “news hour”.

The emphasis on “live” reports when they add nothing to the
story, and are often beyond the competence of nervous reporters, is just one of
many pointless elements in a news format that can best be described as selling
the sizzle rather than the steak.

Add to that the silly and awkward gesticulating and flapping
of hands in an attempt to dramatise whatever point the reporter is making, the
increasing use of elaborate three-dimensional graphics that distract the viewer
rather than enhance our understanding of whatever’s being reported, the use of
“vox pops” to tell us what ordinary New Zealanders think about the complex
issues of the day (as if questioning half a dozen shoppers chosen at random in
a mall reveals anything of value or insight), the reporting of hysterical tweets by social media non-entities and the contrived chumminess of
the interactions between newsreaders and reporters, and it all adds up to what
I regard as debasement of the news.

Oh, and did I mention the tendency of some newsreaders to
comment on whatever item has just been screened, apparently in the
misapprehension that we might be interested in what they think?

Meanwhile, basic but essential things – such as captions
identifying the people talking on screen – are commonly overlooked, leaving us
scratching our heads about who they are and where they fit into the story.

In an informed democracy, news deserves to be treated
seriously. It doesn’t need to be propped up by gimmickry.

To surround it with silly contrivances indicates disrespect for both the news and for the audience watching it - a sense that the news isn't capable of standing on its own merit and must be gussied up to make it more appealing. But to borrow the nightly sign-off line of the legendary American newsreader Walter Cronkite, that's the way it is.

Monday, August 5, 2019

Justice minister Andrew Little has announced details of the
abortion bill to go before Parliament, and already it’s abundantly clear that
we shouldn’t expect balanced media coverage.

The tone was set in an opinion piece today in which Stuff political reporter Henry Cooke wrote
that the government was finally moving after years of “shameful inaction”. Politicians
had put abortion in the too-hard basket ever since the “absurdity” of the
current law was passed in 1977, he said.

Well, at least we now know not to expect neutral coverage of
this divisive issue from Cooke. So how do things look elsewhere?

Er, not good. TV3’s 6 o’clock news last night, in an item foreshadowing
today’s announcement, featured a sympathetic interview with a woman who said
she was made to feel like a criminal for wanting an abortion and didn’t think
there should be any statutory limits on when terminations could be carried out.

Political editor Tova O’Brien didn’t declare an explicitly partisan
position but the thrust of the item was unmistakable. In a three-minute item,
there was no room for anyone from the pro-life lobby.

How about state radio, then? The signs are not promising
there, either. Radio New Zealand last month ran an Eyewitness programme eulogising the women who ran the Sisters
Overseas Service for pregnant women wanting abortions in the 1970s.

Again, the documentary wasn’t explicitly pro-abortion, but it
didn’t need to be. The women of the SOS were presented as heroines fighting for
a self-evidently noble and righteous cause.

As an aside, Eyewitness
recalled events of that time with such confidence and authority that listeners
could have assumed the reporter/producer had personally lived through it. In fact
Claire Crofton, who made the item for RNZ, is a recent arrival from Britain.
She revealed in another recent programme that she’s a Brexit refugee, which
possibly says something about her politics.

Is it too much to expect that on a highly sensitive political
and moral issue such as this, one that resonates deeply with New Zealanders on
both sides of the debate, we might be spared propaganda made at public expense
by an outsider?

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion organisation Voice for Life has
accused another RNZ journalist, Susan Strongman, of collaborating with Terry
Bellamak of the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand in an exercise apparently aimed at discrediting pro-life pregnancy counsellors.

According to VFL, a post by Strongman on the ALRANZ Facebook
page was introduced as “a request from a friendly journalist”. It said she was
keen to hear from anyone who had sought pregnancy counselling “only to find
they [the counsellors] are pushing a pro-life agenda”.

The post continued: “Have you ever been shown tiny
fetus toys, offered baby clothes or given inaccurate information on the risks
of abortion? If so, I would love to speak with you for an investigation into
New Zealand’s crisis pregnancy centres.

“You can remain anonymous, and
Terry can vouch for me as being a reliable and trustworthy journalist.”

Strongman finished by giving her
Radio New Zealand email address and added “or you can get my mobile number off
Terry”. How cosy.

VFL complained to Radio New
Zealand, claiming the purpose was to undermine the fund-raising efforts of organisations
such as Pregnancy Help and Pregnancy Counselling Services.

The reply from Stephen Smith,
acting CEO and editor-in-chief of RNZ, blandly assured VFL there was no
collaboration between Strongman and ALRANZ and that the story she was working
on was not initiated by Bellamak’s organisation.

It went on to say: “RNZ
journalists have contacts in many organisations and are committed to following
a well-established editorial process to ensure that stories are fair and
balanced.” Not exactly a resounding denial, then.

In the meantime, anyone wanting
to satisfy themselves that Strongman’s stories on abortion are fair and balanced
is unlikely to be reassured by a tweet that she posted on May 16. It concerned
a story Strongman had written for RNZ about a woman whom she claimed
contemplated suicide after being refused a second-trimester abortion.

Strongman then added: “This is
what can happen when an abortion decision is not yours to make.” In those few
words she segued from reportage to activism. On the strength of that, I wouldn’t
trust her to write balanced stories about abortion.

As the abortion debate heats up, we can expect to see many
more examples of advocacy journalism for the pro-abortion case. Overwhelmingly,
the default position in media coverage is that the abortion laws are repressive
and archaic and that reform is not only overdue but urgent.

But at times like this the public more than ever look to the
media for impartial coverage. Is it too much to expect that journalists set
aside their personal views and concentrate instead on giving people the
information they need to properly weigh the conflicting arguments and form
their own conclusions?

Asked on Morning
Report this morning whether the Greens would again be partners in a
coalition with New Zealand First in 2020, Greens co-leader James Shaw replied: “Ultimately
the voters get to decide what the formation of government looks like.”

Actually no, they don’t. That’s an out-and-out falsehood.

I’m sorry to keep banging on about this, but under MMP the
voters have a limited role in deciding the outcome of elections. Their involvement ceases once they cast their
votes, which is only the first half of the process.

As the last election made dramatically clear, the crucial second
half is controlled by the politicians. It takes place behind closed doors and
the voters have no control over the outcome. They don’t even know the terms on
which the government is being formed. They might be told later, after the
event, but there’s no guarantee even of that.

This is a very large pachyderm in the political
room, and refusing to acknowledge it doesn’t make it go away.

In 2017, the government formation process resulted in a gross
distortion of what the voters wanted, with a party that won only 7 percent of
the vote exploiting a flawed system to demand – and get – a disproportionate
share of power. The voters were shafted.

Yes, I know the old first-past-the-post arrangements were
flawed too. But please, let’s abandon the fallacy that under MMP, the voters determine
who will govern us. More than ever, the last general election exposed that as a
Big Lie.

Saturday, August 3, 2019

We live in excitable times. It’s hard to recall a time when
politics was more febrile and overheated.

I don’t mean in Parliament, where it’s more or less business
as usual (in fact surprisingly civilised, considering the intensity of the debates
raging outside), but around the fringes – in the mainstream media, and more
particularly in online forums – on issues that include race, gender, sexual
identity, equality, climate change, women’s rights, freedom of speech, immigration
and poverty.

For this we can blame several factors, all of which are
inter-connected and feed into each other.

One is the sheer multiplicity of voices clamouring to
be heard, which is a direct consequence of the digital revolution. For evidence
of this you need only look at the daily online summary of political news and
comment compiled by Victoria University political scientist Bryce Edwards,
which has grown to the point where it’s almost indigestible. New commentators
and hitherto unknown online platforms seem to emerge by the day.

Some people welcome this as true democracy in action, since
access to public platforms is no longer controlled by a handful of gatekeepers as in the old
“legacy” media. But it’s a very raucous, divisive form of democracy, and I
question whether it’s representative of society as whole, since the loudest
voices tend to represent extremes of opinion. We should never make the mistake
of assuming that the voices given most prominence in mainstream and online media
reflect what most New Zealanders are thinking. By definition, it’s the zealots
who are most motivated to promulgate their ideas.

Another factor is the polarising effect of computer algorithms
that herd people into online echo chambers on both left and right, where they
reinforce each other’s prejudices and are comfortably insulated against
competing ideas.

In the process, the middle ground gets lost. The moderating
function of the old “broad-church” mainstream media, where people were exposed
to a range of opinions that could sway the open-minded, has greatly diminished.

A third potent factor is the ascendancy of identity politics
and neo-Marxist ideology which magnifies minority grievances and promotes a
view of society as bitterly divided between privileged classes (typically white,
older and male-dominated) and disadvantaged minorities demanding redress. This corrosive,
Marxist-influenced view of society as a competitive arena where interest groups
are intractably at odds with each other is hardly new, but it’s only in recent
years that it has become a dominant narrative in public discourse.

On top of all this, we’ve seen a profound change in the character
of the mainstream media. Many journalists no longer see themselves as
dispassionate chroniclers of events and disseminators of opinions held by
others, but as active agents of political, social and economic change in their
own right.

The professional scepticism that journalists once cultivated
has largely vanished as older hands have retired or been purged. The younger journalists
who have succeeded them are like blotting paper, uncritically absorbing fashionable
ideological views. The more emotive the cause and the more passionate the
rhetoric of its advocates, the more eagerly it’s embraced.

The explanation for this change is simple. It dates from the
time several decades ago when the media industry decided that the training of journalists –
previously done “on the job” – should be handed to tertiary education
institutes, many of them staffed by ideologues who saw the media as part of the
capitalist power structure and therefore ripe for subversion. Journalism students
were encouraged to think their primary purpose was to challenge that power structure. The
result – not immediate, but gradual and insidious – was the politicisation of a
profession that previously took pride in neutrality and balance.

In this homogeneous environment, certain things are accepted
as given. It’s assumed that anyone with a shred of intelligence or morality despises
Donald Trump and his knuckle-dragging supporters. Commentators demonstrate
their impeccably woke credentials by the vehemence with which they attack
Trump, never pausing to think that they are preaching to the converted or that
the message loses its potency with constant repetition, no matter how florid
the denunciation. Meanwhile, ironically, a second Trump term looks increasingly
likely as his would-be Democratic Party challengers tear each other apart.

Brexit is another touchstone of fashionable political
sensibilities, being generally portrayed as the last desperate flailing of
fossilised British reactionaries rather than as a legitimate attempt by a
country to re-assert sovereignty over its own affairs.

Media bias is all-pervasive in print and electronic media but
reaches its peak on shows like TV3’s The
Project, whose smug, self-reinforcing groupthink and fondness for carefully
selected, like-minded guest panellists verges on nauseating. But pockets of
resistance remain, and they are mainly to be found in commercial radio.

I have no doubt that hosts such as Mike Hosking, Sean Plunket and
Heather du Plessis-Allan are more in tune with mainstream public opinion than
the left-leaning commentators who tend to prevail in most media outlets.
Opinion polls and general elections consistently show, after all, that New
Zealand generally leans to the centre-right – something a visitor from another
galaxy would never guess from a sampling of media opinion.

One casualty of this bias is the old-fashioned idea that
there are two sides to every story. If it looks like an injustice, it must be
one. If an aggrieved party presents an emotionally compelling story, it should
be accepted as true. No need to dig further.

We can see this in the overwhelmingly sympathetic media
coverage of the Ihumatao occupation and Oranga Tamariki child uplifts, where
the voices of those bold enough to defend the status quo have largely been
crowded out.

It took quite some time for the media to acknowledge that
the lawful Maori owners of the disputed land at Ihumatao were happy with their
deal with Fletcher Residential and wanted the proposed housing development to
proceed. That fact was conveniently obscured.

Ihumatao is not another Bastion Point or Moutoa Gardens,
where the protesting occupiers wanted to reclaim land that was historically
theirs but had been taken away. Many, if not most, of the protesters occupying
the Ihumatao site appear to have no direct ancestral link with the land (busloads
came from Northland and Taranaki) and can be seen as be usurping the rights
of the Maori owners. NZ First’s Shane Jones derisively referred to them as
“yoga pants” protesters and said they didn’t speak for the mana whenua. Yet it
seems to have suited the media to characterise the dispute as a contest between
greedy developers and dispossessed iwi, which it’s not.

The narrative has largely been dictated by the articulate
and media-savvy young Maori lawyer Pania Newton, leader of the protest
occupation. You had to feel sorry for
poor Te Warena Taua, spokesman for the land’s owners, who barely got a look in.
No one seemed terribly interested in his protestation that Te Kawerau a Maki,
the iwi authority that owns the land, supports the development, or that Fletcher
had given back eight hectares and made special provision for Maori housing.
These facts got in the way of a much more appealing story about racism and
injustice. (That Taua happens to be Newton’s uncle demonstrates how
tortuously tangled these affairs can be.)

And now, to complicate what was already a messy but
essentially intra-Maori schism, Jacinda Ardern’s government – panicked by all
the negative coverage and unnerved by demands that Ardern get involved – has
clumsily crashed into the dispute and in doing so, has undermined the Treaty
settlement process, property rights and the rule of law.

As with Ihumatao, so also for the emotive and largely
one-sided media coverage of the uplifts issue. Oranga Tamariki’s practice of
removing mostly Maori newborn babies from situations where their safety was
considered to be at risk has been portrayed as cruel and culturally
insensitive. A protest rally at Parliament,
with angry denunciations of supposedly callous, racist social workers, led the
6pm news on TV3.

But hang on. Earlier that day on Duncan Garner’s AM Show on the same channel, Northland
GP Lance O’Sullivan, a Maori and a former New Zealander of the Year, said he
supported uplifts and moreover believed that Oranga Tamariki deserved more
resources. He recalled being traumatised by the death of a two-year-old girl
killed by her mother and insisted that children must be safe, “whatever that
takes”.

“When I had this child die in Kaitaia two years ago I would
have loved to have a rally,” O’Sullivan said pointedly. “I would love to have
had a hui and had all the leading names of Maori come along to protest and cry
out about the death of another Maori child, [but] there was no such thing.”

It was a clear rebuke of those organising the march on
Parliament. But again, no prizes for guessing which opinion got maximum prime-time
exposure. O’Sullivan was seen only by the relatively small breakfast audience
(and then largely by accident, since he had gone on the show to talk about
something else).

Winston Peters also supports Oranga Tamariki. He told a
press conference that three Maori children had died since the uplifts
controversy flared in May. “I don’t see many headlines about that and that’s a
tragedy.”

Even Peters gets some things right. Yet the media continue
to highlight emotive and misleading phrases such as “Our babies are taken”
(1News) and “stolen children” (Reuters).

There was another reminder this week that child uplifts
might not be altogether a bad thing. A story in the New Zealand Herald revealed that 16-month-old Malcolm Bell, who
died in Starship Hospital after being admitted with suspected non-accidental
injuries, was one of six children and that all his older siblings had been
taken from his mother, Savanna Bell.

The story didn’t specifically mention uplifts and it wasn’t
clear whether Malcolm was in the care of his mother or his wider whanau when he
died. (A man has been charged with his murder.) But it did reveal that Oranga
Tamariki had received calls from people who were concerned about the little boy’s
welfare. The Herald also disclosed
that Savanna Bell is the sister of the notorious murderer William Bell, who killed
three people while robbing the Mt Wellington Panmure RSA in 2001.

Add all this together and it seems plain that Malcolm was
born into a high-risk family. People say uplifts are racist, but the statistics
show that Maori children are grossly over-represented in abuse statistics. Savanna
Bell kept having children despite obviously being considered unfit as a
mother.In such situations, uplifts
would seem to be the safest, if not the only, option. It has been shown too
often that faith in the nurturing care of the whanau can be tragically
misplaced.

As for those terrible abuse statistics, we’re repeatedly
told that they’re a consequence of colonisation – another claim uncritically
parroted by credulous journalists. There’s never a mention of the horrific endemic
violence practised in pre-colonial Maoridom, or acknowledgment of the manifold
benefits that colonisation brought.

Journalistic balance is what’s missing here, but balance is
no longer the editorial requirement that it used to be. That was never better
demonstrated than when Stuff announced last year that it would no longer give
space to the views of climate-change sceptics.

Is there an over-arching ideological agenda here? That might
be going too far. I don’t believe there are neo-Marxist cells in newsrooms. But
it’s fair to ask whether the purpose of much alarmist journalism and overheated
media comment is to induce a mood of national anxiety and shame, and thereby to
soften the country up for the radical social and political change favoured by
noisy activists. We can only hope the public is smart enough not to fall for
it.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.